No sex utopia

Rios’s mountainside camp throughout the town of Icononzo holds three hundred anyone, where 125 was females, consistent with the latest intercourse proportion away from FARC as official website a whole.

“For all of us, ladies have the same legal rights just like the guys,” told you 38-year-dated Gregory Morales, a beneficial 17-season experienced of push back group.

Rather than the best-wing paramilitaries it fought against, FARC provides a sex commentary, told you Kimberly Theidon, a teacher and you may academic director regarding gender research from inside the around the world training within Tufts University’s Fletcher College.

Both previous and you may current ladies in FARC IRIN interviewed said they’d joined the newest rebels willingly and had come free to favor its intimate partners. None said they had encountered intimate problems – statements in line with exactly what one to upheaval counselor just who works closely with ex-combatants had and additionally observed.

These membership vary from account authored by person liberties watchdogs such as for instance Amnesty Around the world and those rights did not increase to their authorities when they came to pregnancies.

“When you are a good guerrilla, you have to get birth-control,” said Victoria Sandino, a senior FARC frontrunner who was this new group’s representative into an effective intercourse sub-fee while in the serenity conversations in Havana, Cuba.

She told you it had been a requirement because the FARC was in an enthusiastic active war. In the event that guerrillas got expecting and you may planned to support the child, that they had to go out of the team. Whenever they planned to remain, they had so you can abort, told you Sandino.

“There’s this new ideology and there’s the facts, and there is a gap between them,” said Theidon, noting how she got seen center-aged commanders which have pretty girls of the the side. “What is actually towards the forty five-year-old man with the younger guerrillera?”

Theidon, who has investigated the fresh new FARC generally, said male guerrillas have said they don’t need certainly to get married its comrades due to the fact female fighters have acquired multiple intimate partners. “There can be good stigma to this type of female, also one of the ones it served with.”

Females are not represented from the most useful echelons of your armed outfit. In the eight-associate secretariat one to governs the new FARC, as an example, there are not any women.

“For people, it’s been hard to get into ranking out of frontrunners since it is a military with a great patriarchal program and you may machismo,” Sandino approved, adding you to definitely during the tranquility deals, an inside strive having identifying women ensued.

“If you are going to place the landmine, you should be sure to do not inhale, that the give you should never shake”

Five years in the past, she told you, there are no lady among the many 31 older commanders of your FARC’s mutual standard staff. Now, there are 61 commanders and you can eleven of those was ladies.

Friendship and you may fraternity

From the time 32-year-old Yurany Cardenas is children increasing upon a farm boxed-in of the araderie. She dutifully helped the girl mommy and nothing brother develop corn and you will yucca, but it was an older men cousin she appeared to. Whenever she is 14 years old, one cousin, aged twenty two during the time, kept to participate the brand new FARC.

Cardenas, for example others raised from inside the remote corners out of Colombia, was already regularly the team. Their mommy are also worst to send Cardenas and her sibling to college and you can FARC fighters pitched inside. “They gave my personal mother currency and so i might go to school, pick guides and you will clothing,” told you Cardenas. “With regards to let, I analyzed 36 months from number one university.”

But Cardenas was not looking school. She wanted to register the girl relative. Cardenas said she made several attempts to encourage the new guerrillas and you can they finally assented, to your updates she talked to help you their mother about any of it. Their mom, unsurprisingly, begged her to stay: “You may be larger, but not big enough,” Cardenas remembered the woman claiming.